


such great heights

by strikinglight



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: F/F, Knights - Freeform, Non-Linear Narrative, Pre-Canon, with chunks that spill over into the canon timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-15
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2019-03-05 04:36:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13380312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: “Did my father order you to watch over me, too?”“You know how he can be,” says Syrene. She is well aware it’s neither a yes nor a no. “That said, I’m honestly not sure you need me at all any longer.”“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Tana’s quick to answer, amused, her dark eyes sparkling. “I imagine I’ll always need you, Syrene. No one else will tell me quite so directly when my throw is short.”Tana and Syrene map the patterns that recur, and discover that some things don't so much change as come into their own.





	such great heights

**Author's Note:**

> Or: an extended a love letter to Tana, who is!! such a good girl!!!! via Syrene, who has in all likelihood just Been There, forever,
> 
> Special thanks to the magnificent Winny, for lovingly watering this story-seed (and so many others!) before it ever even showed any signs of actually growing into anything (!), and for all the Achaeus headcanons and the long bouts of Tana(AAAAA)-related crying, and then some.

_Love loves to stand heroic  
__on the ridgeline, before fire_   

 _spreads, before loneliness,  
_ _which never goes away,_

_returns._

_\- Stacie Cassarino, "Diagram for Wind"_  

 

Syrene opens her eyes. There is the arc of Tana’s arm above her head—a spread wing, framing the sun.

Or, well, she thinks, blinking, what appears to be the sun. After she’s rolled onto her side and scrubbed a hand across her face she can see it turns out to be no more than a lit lamp, suspended from the tent ceiling. It shines warm on the crown of Tana’s head and down the nape of her neck as she does up her hair, gathering the thick locks in one hand, patiently combing out the length a tangle at a time with the other.

Tana must hear her stirring; her head flicks around, then her body follows in a half-turn, and as she blinks the last of the sleep from her eyes Syrene sees her expression cycle briskly between various shades of perplexed and alert before settling at last on a gentle, fond amusement. “Rest at ease, Commander. It’s still dark out.”

“All the more uncanny to find you already awake, then, milady.” In direct defiance of the order she’s just received, Syrene rises on one elbow. Sits up, and shakes out her hair. A quick sweep of the bed and the surrounding area reveals her comb is in Tana’s hand, so she settles for working at her own tangles manually instead. “And doing your own hair, no less.”

“Huh. Here I thought you’d thank me for not waking you. Is it really so odd?”

“If you want the truth of it, then yes. I remember a time that you would have slept until noon if you’d been allowed.”

That was a different time, of course. Perhaps also a different Tana, before the war had taken them both. But this Tana is still one that grins and bites her lip to stifle a giggle, so even in the thick of the pre-dawn darkness it’s easy enough for Syrene to remember who she is—who they are, and where, and how they came to be here.

“I can’t decide if I miss those days.” With deft fingers she winds the cords that hold her ponytail in place and sets to braiding down the front, first the right side, then the left. Her eyes watch Syrene’s face as she works, thoughtful even as they dance with mischief under the lantern-light. “Anyway, I want to take the dawn patrol. Will you join me, or will you sleep in as I’d meant you to?”

 

* * *

 

“Lower. Relax your grip. Faster on the block. Left. Right. Left. Forward now.” 

The trouble is not that Tana has never fought before, necessarily. The trouble, Syrene has realized after less than a week’s training, is that Tana has no idea how to conserve her energy enough to keep a steady pace. She takes the running line at a sprint, only to drop gradually toward the rear and end on her hands and knees, winded in the dirt. At spearfighting practice she aims her thrusts too high and advances when she should retreat, and grips the spear so tightly the friction makes her palms crack and the blood run downward in thin trickles, and Syrene can tell she’s begun to press the attack to mask the pain.

“Hold.” Syrene stops the bout with an upraised hand and steps forward. “Tana, show me your hands.”

Tana wavers. Her eyes are wide with battle-fire and the pointed spark of something that might be fear. “I’m fine.” She looks as though she means to end there but thinks better of it, adding, after a reluctant pause, “Ma’am.”

 _In any corps but mine you’d get at least a slap on the wrist for your impertinence,_ thinks Syrene. But then again, she knows she herself might just as soon be stripped of her rank if anyone at the castle heard her address the princess so brusquely, and _by name,_ at that. And yet there is no place here for princesses and miladies and Your Highnesses—Tana had shed that privilege willingly when she enlisted, so now who’s to say what any of them are to one another anymore? It’s all so tangled she almost laughs.

“Surely you don’t mean to tell me I’m imagining that blood on your wrists. Hands, please; let Vanessa take your spear.”

Tana’s hands are still princess hands; still so soft and fair and slender, the skin sore and blistering now from all the work they have still to grow into. Syrene knows that nothing but the work will turn them tough, and it only stands to reason that Tana knows this too.

“Vanessa, see your partner back to the barracks,” Syrene calls over her shoulder to her sister, silences Tana with a look when she opens her mouth to protest. “Save that spirit of yours, my girl. You’ll need it for the road ahead.”

The winged knights of Frelia endure long and arduous ground training before they ever so much as lay eyes on a potential mount. They practice with sword and spear, study strategy, history, pegasus handling and care. Should they make it so far, they tame and train their own mounts, first alone and later in coordination with the rest of the squad. They learn, rapidly, to meet hardship with fortitude, as soldiers do. Or not. In her short tenure as commander Syrene’s seen girls with far more combat experience and raw strength than Tana break and section out before the end.

The difference, Syrene supposes, is that they did not have her joy. Tana is there as proof that joy can be courage too, a grit of a different kind that shows its face so clearly when she takes a breath to release the tension in her body, toughens her stance and nods and says, with improbable good cheer, “I understand, Commander.”

Vanessa takes Tana’s arm—for support, perhaps, although Syrene knows Tana will refuse to take it, will not lean into her where anyone else can see—and they walk together. Syrene watches them until they’re out of sight.

 

* * *

 

Syrene is absent when Tana flies off to march beside Eirika of Renais. She does not even hear of it until after she receives the summons from Castle Frelia, calling her back without explanation from her posting on the Grado border.

“I’ve all but moved a mountain to get her to return home.” It’s probably not an exaggeration. At a desk for once instead of on a throne, King Hayden appears smaller than she’s ever seen him, his face drawn and thin and his hands steepled pensive before his face. “I am hoping your luck will be better. She listens to you.”

 _When I make sense to her,_ Syrene is careful not to say. She knows she need not say it, because Hayden knows his children. Moreover, Tana knows her own mind better than either of them, or anyone. That fact itself is what has led them both here to stand in her absence, listen to it echo all around them with the force of a shout.

Syrene thinks of her sister Vanessa, and of the letter she sent to the southern outpost not long ago announcing her own deployment. She studies Hayden’s face and thinks of her own father, who looks at his soldier daughters with a fear that Syrene well knows is the other face of love, who has looked at Tana the same way and embraced her, every time she’s ever visited their house.

 _Stand by Her Highness, Syrene,_ she remembers him saying, the first time. _That girl is so much like a storm._

“I will do my utmost, Your Majesty,” she says at last. For both their fathers. Never mind that even this almost feels like too much to promise, when the truth is that her heart had entered her throat the second she walked into this room and refused to return to its proper place. Now as she speaks Syrene can feel it thundering beneath the skin, heavy with blood, wild with every fear she will not name aloud: Tana fallen, Tana injured, Tana dead. But also, for all that, a strange pride she can’t ignore: _Of course, of course she would go alone._

“I have faith you will do right by my daughter, Syrene.”

Syrene glances out the window and traces with her eyes a long path down into the forests to the east, east and up again into the mountain ranges beyond, east where the sun wakes later and later and the shadows stretch their hands out.

“That makes one of us, Your Majesty,” she tells him, wryly, and for just a moment he forgets himself enough to bark out a laugh.

 

* * *

 

“I’ll let you down at the first break in the trees. From there on, you have to go alone.” 

There’s a full moon on the rise overhead when the forest comes into view, the spread of black pine touched with silver in the light, unrolling farther and farther than the eye can mark. By now Syrene has flown the breadth of it, far enough to know the trees run right up against the coastline to the north, and has made this ride to its nearer borders enough times now that she can let the reins go slack in her hand, trusting Bellona to know her own way home.

“The tree trunks are painted with white feathers to mark the path you ought to follow. When you reach the clearing where the pegasi gather, make no sudden movements; stay quiet, and introduce yourself slowly. And, Tana, remember—”

“To keep my heart open, and choose the one who chooses me,” Tana finishes. The point of her chin rests against Syrene’s shoulder, and she all but sings the words into her ear. “I remember, Syrene! You only explained it thrice.”

Fighting words. The cheer in her voice is unmistakable, but this close it’s impossible not to hear the cracks—a subtle tremor here, an upward lilt there, like she’s trying especially hard to convince whoever’s listening of the truth of it, the better to convince herself. Her arms have locked tight around Syrene’s ribcage, trapping her breath between the bones.

“You’ll be all right, then,” Syrene tells her, but those arms don’t loosen.

Soon Bellona’s flexing her wings out by her sides in preparation for the downward glide, and then the road is rising to meet them, and they’re on the ground again. One after the other they dismount; after Syrene turns her pegasus loose in the meadow at the forest’s edge, they walk together, to stand in the shadows cast by the first of the pines.

The wind is high tonight, and the air cold. When Tana shivers in the draught that ripples by, Syrene reaches out a thoughtless hand to tuck the cloak more closely about her neck. “You’ll be all right,” she says again.

“How do you know?” asks Tana, and she hasn’t stopped trembling, and there’s something cracking a little in her face then, too, when she smiles. It strikes Syrene then that Tana must not yet know the measure of her own strength. She wears it instead like an emblem upon her back, such that she herself never sees it and yet everyone who looks at her knows that it exists.

Syrene, for her part, has always known it exists.

“Because I know you.” She takes Tana’s hands, holds them safely pressed between both of her own, the two of them at anchor. “The fear is part of it. Go to meet it, like the soldier you are.” She pauses over this only a moment before she adds, “You’ll find me waiting here when you return.”

She sees Tana cease her shivering, feels the pressure of her fingers as they curl inward, close up tight. Syrene is certain there was a time that she would have been able to break that hold whenever she wanted, without a second thought. Now she finds she’s not so sure she could—and _wanting_ to, well, that’s another matter entirely.

“Syrene,” she says. And again, “Syrene, I need you to be with me.”

Which is to say, Syrene knows, _I will never let you go._ She hears it clear, silver as moonlight, fast and fearless as flying, and the voice of her own inmost self raised in answer: _I will never let you go._

“I am. You already know I am.” Syrene leans in and kisses her forehead, and releases her. “To the end I will be with you. Now go.”

 

* * *

 

Tana’s walking her pegasus to cool him down when Syrene finds her again, around and around the swathe of open meadow the army has commandeered for pastureland. The sun is only half-sunk below the horizon, the western sky still all rosy and gold-touched with the last of its rays, and gentle in a way that belies all the wars being fought beneath it. Back at camp, they are possibly only just beginning to take out the torches.

Achaeus pulls ahead of Tana to greet Syrene when she comes into their line of sight. He noses her shoulder and snuffles into her hair, whickering gently like a colt, but she doesn’t miss the pride with which he’s learned to hold his head, or the corded muscle running all up his forelegs and across his chest. There’s a scar, too, that she hasn’t seen before; a white puckered crescent moon on the left shoulder, just below where the wing joins the body.

“That one was an arrow at Carcino. It would have taken me in the leg if he hadn’t moved fast, I think.” Tana draws up beside her, reaching out to trace the shape with a fingertip. Her eyes are soft as she remembers, and bright with pain. “I dressed and stitched it up the way you taught me. Eirika rides with plenty of healers, of course, but I told myself you’d have done the same in my place.”

“It was well done.” Syrene for her part has memorized the story of each of Bellona’s scars, knows too well what it’s like to look at each fresh wound and feel it cut at her in turn, to wish it into her own body instead. For Tana there will be no better comfort than the truth, spoken by one who knows what this exact kind of hurt is like. “He’s stronger for it now, and so are you.”

“I hope so. It can be hard to tell, sometimes.” Achaeus nuzzles her cheek in what seems to be agreement. Tana smiles as if to say she’ll take it gladly, and lets the memory go. “Did my father order you to watch over me, too?”

“You know how he can be,” says Syrene. She is well aware it’s neither a yes nor a no. “That said, I’m honestly not sure you need me at all any longer.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Tana’s quick to answer, amused, her dark eyes sparkling. “I imagine I’ll always need you, Syrene. No one else will tell me quite so directly when my throw is short.”

In the distance, the sun is sinking ever lower. Achaeus whinnies, restless now, and Tana kisses him on the nose before she turns him out into the grass. Her quiver of javelins swings as she moves, the weight of it easy on her shoulder, the steel spearheads too worn and well-used to shine in the twilight.

“Let me see your hands.”

She offers them readily this time, grinning as she peels the glove from the left one to show Syrene how the fighting has turned it rough. The skin has hardened into its own armor in all the places it should, for a spearfighter—across the top of the palm, in the arc between thumb and forefinger—and to Syrene this is the strongest and most beautiful thing to touch in all the world. Syrene finds she recognizes those hands as she might recognize herself, as she must surely recognize this Tana who stands tall now, who can hurl a javelin farther and faster than a lightning bolt. This Tana laughs and smiles like nothing can touch her, and yet has seen enough of war to know how to wield that joy of hers like a weapon, swiftly and with all her courage, in defense of everything still dear and precious in the world.

“Since you mean to stay,” and here Tana leans forward and speaks in the hushed tones she only ever uses behind a closed door, a voice for secrets and for sweetness, and for quiet places where only the two of them know to go, “were you intending to sleep in your sister’s tent, or mine?”

Sometimes Tana is wicked, too. Tana is her soldier and her liege and her lantern in the dark and the reason for the fiercest headaches Syrene has weathered in her life, and when Syrene frames the curve of her cheek in her palm all these pieces still fall into place like they all belong together, as they always have.

“I am yours to command, milady.”

Certainly she must already know this. Syrene figures she might do worse than tell her again anyway.

 

* * *

 

According to custom—and this particular custom has always seemed, to Syrene, pleasingly apropos—Frelia’s pegasus knights take their vows in the castle’s central atrium, under the open sky. Further, although the ceremony cannot go forward without the crown’s blessing, and the king himself stands at the head of the assembly throughout the proceedings, it is most often still a knight anointed who names another to the fold. 

“You have been deemed fit to serve by those who would fly alongside you in the vanguard, and have expressed in turn your willingness to accept this honor from our hands. Do you now swear by all that you hold sacred, good, and true, before the eyes of all here present, that you will wield your lance bravely in defense of crown and kingdom, the causes of the just, and all those who cannot defend themselves?”

“I do so swear.”

Syrene’s own knighting is not so distant that conferring the accolade herself no longer feels strange, as if at any moment her memories might take her out of her body and place her where she belongs, on her knees on the flagstones, listening half to the vows being read overhead and half only to her own heart hammering itself senseless against her armor. Or perhaps what she feels so acutely aware of is the strangeness of the occasion itself—herself standing with the king’s own sword in her hand, the princess kneeling at her feet with her head humbly bowed, and all the court arrayed around them in the thick of a keen, crackling silence.

It’s a hush that sounds like a held breath, like the coming of a storm. Syrene speaks into it and wills her voice not to tremble.

“That you will conduct yourself in all things with wisdom, grace, and courtesy, as befits your station, for the sake of your own good name and the honor of your king, your captains, and your peers?”

“I do so swear.”

The words are tradition, of course; a ritual older than both of them, and likely to outlive them both and then some. And yet, for all that, Tana responds to them as if they’re hers, every avowal ringing from the heart of her, every word crisp and clear—and in that moment, Syrene’s willing to wager, there’s not a soul listening who doesn’t believe.

”That in all matters requiring your judgment you will seek to uphold the truth, and thereby protect the trust we place in you this day, for all your days?”

“I do so swear.”

 _I do so swear._ In silence Syrene echoes her own vow, and continues.

“Then having sworn these solemn oaths, know now that I, Syrene, Commander of the Winged Knights’ Third Battalion, by right of arms, do dub you in the service of the realm.”

Hayden comes forward to touch her shoulder as she speaks, and she feels the strength of his hand course down the arm that holds the sword, so that without wavering she might raise it, and touch Tana with the flat of the blade—first on the left shoulder, then the right, then the top of the head, the stars above so close they seem to crown her.

“Tana of Frelia, rise a knight.”

 

* * *

 

“It stays dark for so long out here. Will it be much longer before dawn, do you think?” 

The morning’s fog means they need to rise higher than they usually do to scope out the land below, and still so many things cut at the sky as they climb, here, so close to Darkling Woods. The mountains square their jagged shoulders; the trees rear up taller and blacker and thornier than any others Syrene has ever seen. She feels the cold breath of the night before on the back of her neck and averts it by urging Bellona onward and upward— _above, above, to where the fog breaks._

“Maybe not so long, milady. We wait for it because we trust in it to come.”

“I do hope it won’t be long.” For all the unease in her tone, Tana sits high in the saddle now, like she belongs there. She looks ready to claim the entire sky, but then she turns her head and grins, and for a heartbeat or two is just Tana again. “I was afraid of the dark once, you know.”

She still remembers how once she and Tana had ridden north at moonrise to another kinder forest, the wind behind them, the silver in the pines. How they had stood at the edge of that darkness and promised _To the end I will be with you, even when you walk alone._ At that time, Tana had not yet grown into her strength and walked like she was fighting herself with every step—to trust in the promise without having to look at it, to muster the courage not to turn around.

Syrene had stayed and watched her until she was out of sight. She had remained as the moon set and the sun came up again above the mountains to the east, bringing Tana back with the dawn as she had known it would, beaming and resplendent on the back of the wild winged horse she herself had tamed, as a soldier does. And when in the quiet brightening of that second morning Tana had called her name and leapt with wild abandon into her arms, sending the two of them tumbling and tangled into the high grass, Syrene had taken the light inside her like a blessing and not let it go.

“You don’t stop for it anymore, though,” she points out. “Now you go to meet it.”

Later, she thinks, there will be time enough to take stock of all the other ways the years have changed them. For now, even as the nights grow longer and longer and sharp-edged shadows cover the face of the world they know, even as war tears the land open down to its bones, they have the promise of things that do not so much change as come into their own—yet another dawn to reach toward, and the flight that will take them to it, higher and higher.

“There it is, Syrene.”

Syrene opens her eyes. There is the arc of Tana’s arm above her head—a spread wing, framing the sun.


End file.
